Gonna toot my own research direction: artificial intelligence x complex systems. I’m talking differentiable self-organization (e.g., neural cellular automata), interacting particle systems (e.g., particle Lenia), and other neural dynamical systems where emergent behaviour and self-organization are key characteristics.
Other than Alex Mordvintsev and his co-authors, Sebastian Risi and his co-authors, and I suppose David Ha with his new company, I don’t see much work in this intersection of fields.
I think there’s a lot to unlock here, particularly if the task at hand benefits greatly from a decentralized and/or a compute-adaptive approach, with robustness requirements. Swarm Learning already comes to mind. Or generative modelling with/of complex systems, like decentralized flow (or Schrödinger) matching for modelling interacting particle systems (e.g., fluids, gasses, pedestrian traffic).
I'm looking forward to reading through this, as it's what I'm doing my PhD research on.